by Dan Slater
“Don’t worry,” Gabriel said. “I’ll be there.”
Driving toward the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, Meme told Gabriel and Wences that they were going to meet “the men of Nuevo Laredo.” Be serious, he said. There was a mission to do, money to make. “Take advantage of this. Ask for everything you want: ARs, vests, cash, cars. They’ll give it to you.”
Ten minutes later, Wences and Gabriel stood on a patio behind a nice house. A black Suburban backed into the driveway and parked, nose out. Two men got out; one faced the road, the other circled the car. Two others emerged from the truck and walked to the patio. They wore military fatigues, and camouflage hats tied beneath the chin. Gabriel was impressed: the all-black look had become a trend around the hood, but these guys were soldiers. He thought of Bart’s SEAL poster, of the video games they used to play.
As the men approached, Gabriel recognized Comandante Cuarenta—Forty—Miguel Treviño. Gabriel had known that he worked for Miguel, even if orders came from Meme. But he’d hardly seen the man since that night, nearly a year earlier, when he and Wences tried to sell the truck to the wrong cop.
“Saludos, señor,” the boys said.
“Mis Gabachos!” Miguel said, using his slang for Americans. He threw his head back and sighted the boys down his nose. “No me llames ‘señor.’ Señor is for the one in heaven. Call me comandante.” He asked which of them would be his “man.”
When Wences was silent, Gabriel jumped in and said, “Yo mero.” I’m the true one.
Miguel touched Gabriel’s chest and smiled. “Eres como yo, güey. Tú si eres frío.” You’re just as cold as me, dude. Then he touched Wences’s heart; it beat fast. “¿Tienes miedo?” You scared?
“Me acabo de echar un pase,” Wences stuttered, explaining that he’d snorted a line of coke that Meme offered on the drive over. Wences confessed that he thought he was going to get smoked for a load of lost weapons.
“Cómo crees, güey,” Miguel said and laughed. “Eso pasa siempre.” Don’t worry, dude. Shit happens all the time. Miguel turned to Gabriel. “So, you think you’re a badass?”
“Yes, Comandante.”
“How many people have you killed?”
“I don’t know.”
Miguel laughed. “So many that you don’t know? Do you know how many I’ve killed?”
“No, Comandante.”
“I’ve killed more than eight hundred people.”
Gabriel and Wences followed Miguel and Meme into the house for a meeting of Zeta comandantes.
After some talk, the men agreed that the war with their Sinaloa rivals needed to be fought in the States as well as Mexico. Sinaloan contras were jacking Company loads in Mexico, sneaking across the border, and establishing themselves in Texas, where they assumed that the law-and-order culture of America would protect them, or at least make retribution less attractive. Also, by flooding South Texas with money, the Sinaloans—through an allied smuggler in Laredo named Chuy Resendez—were getting Company smugglers to flip sides. All contras and defectors in Texas had to be eliminated, Zeta leadership decided. It could only be done with a strong presence on the U.S. side.
The comandantes looked at Gabriel and Wences, and asked them to find eight Gabachos de huevos, Americans with balls, who could attend a training camp and then join them in the plaza.
Which plaza? Gabriel wondered.
Until now, the only plaza he knew was Nuevo Laredo, where the cops not only looked the other way while he carried out assassinations but often helped him murder people. He and Wences just nodded: Yes, they would do it.
As the boys walked out, the comandantes’ meaning became clear. Miguel gave them $10,000, told them to buy a couple of used cars, and assigned them two commission jobs, for $10,000 a piece—in Laredo.
Laredo? As in Texas?
Doing missions in a place where the authorities took homicide seriously was not the most appealing prospect. But it was Forty asking, Miguel Treviño, and Gabriel understood the implication. To climb the ladder, he had to work in the States.
One of the men Miguel asked them to kill—a Nuevo Laredo cop named Bruno Orozco, who had defected from the Company and now worked with Chuy Resendez in Laredo—had killed Wences’s cousin earlier in the year. Once timid, Wences now appeared bold and willing.
They would do the jobs, Gabriel told Miguel, and they would recruit more firme vatos.
Who’s my man?
I’m the true one.
He was part of something now, and a Wolf Boy never said no.
* * *
I. “Wolf Boys” is the author’s phrase.
PART III
Spillover
The first captive so offered made one a “leading youth,” a “captor,” marked by appropriate face paint, the right to wear a breechclout with handsomely long ends instead of the brief boyish affairs of novices, and a cape bearing a design in place of a plain mantle: no small reward in self-conscious and narcissistic youth.
—AZTECS, INGA CLENDINNEN
12
In the Dirty Room
Midnight closed in, the full moon set the river on fire, and the Treviño brothers were coming to collect.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
Mario Alvarado’s cell phone skittered across the table again. On the third call he answered.
“You messed up,” said Miguel. “You shouldn’t have left. Why’d you leave?”
“You didn’t tell me to stay or nothing,” Mario mustered.
“You’ve got to pay this cuenta,” Miguel said, referring to Mario’s debt. “You owe a lot of money to the gente. Meet Omar on this side. Bring your Hummer, pa entregarlo”—for exchange.
Mario Alvarado, the young American, hung up. Two roads appeared before him. He could kiss the drug-smuggling business goodbye, and disappear. The cuenta was a million dollars. Would the Treviño brothers hurt his family for that much money?
Was Mario really asking?
Option two: Return to the Treviño brothers in Mexico, confront Miguel and Omar, hope they valued their cuenta more than Mario’s head, and then rely on Wayo, Mario’s assistant, to hustle up the debt while Mario offered himself to the brothers as collateral.
Mario Alvarado . . .
Most runners who smuggled bricks and bundles north were mere Company subcontractors: commission men. But Mario Alvarado was American, and he worked for himself. He bought coke and marijuana directly from the Treviño brothers in Mexico, which was like buying directly from the Company. This relationship made Mario more like a partner of the Company than an employee. Granted, he was only one of many runners who moved a piece of the approximately ten tons of coke that the Company sent across each week—about $100 million of product at the 2004 border price of $11,500 per kilo. There were bigger movers working the Dallas hub: José Vasquez, for instance, moved 1,000 kilos to Dallas every month. But José was a Company man making 3 percent per load. On a $20 million deal, Jose’s $800,000 commission equaled Mario’s profit on much smaller and less risky loads. A freelancer with “a direct connect,” Mario “owned” the drugs he moved: The full price spread between the border and Dallas—or between the border and New York—belonged to him. As did the risk in the event, say, that law enforcement stopped one of Mario’s drivers. For three years, Mario’s privilege kept him motivated, a little smug as he hustled across the country, buying and modifying vehicles and expanding his network of northern buyers. On most days he was proud of his position. Tonight, hiding from the brothers, it felt like a sentence.
It began in 2002, when Mario was eighteen and selling enough dime bags of coke in Dallas to finance a hunting trip to Nuevo Laredo. A guide there named Adolfo Treviño, whom everyone called Fito—pronounced “FEE-toh”—charged five hundred dollars for a weeklong deer hunt on his ranch. Mario met Fito’s brothers, Omar and Miguel. Fito and Omar called Miguel “Michael,” but no one else did.
Miguel was a sure shot and a fun guy, generous with instructions about marksmanship. He snacked often on Ro
lo candy, seemingly addicted to the caramel-filled chocolates. When they posed for pictures with their kill, Miguel threw his head back, smiled thinly, and extended the pinkie and pointer fingers of his right hand—“throwing the goat” as it were. Miguel had dark eyes and high-chiseled cheekbones. He was not tall, but thick in the chest, arms, and thighs. The Treviño brothers carried guns in restaurants. They drove twice the speed limit. Cops never bothered them.
On return hunting trips, Mario felt at home in Nuevo Laredo nightclubs, where his gringo dollars earned him consideration he was unaccustomed to in Dallas. One night he ran into Miguel and Omar, who were dressed in black fatigues and riding around town in a caravan of Suburbans. It was now clear to Mario that the Treviño brothers were into more than hunting. They recognized Mario as well. “¿Qué onda, güey?” Miguel said. What’s up, dude?
Mario thought: I want to work.
He asked Omar Treviño about getting kilos, and Omar said Mario could buy as many kilos as he wanted.
The economics were simple. It was a matter of paying $11,500 per kilo in Nuevo Laredo versus paying $18,000 in Dallas. Mario would have to cross the coke over the border himself. But the risk was worth the profit. He returned to Nuevo Laredo with $57,500 in cash and bought five kilos—eleven pounds—from the brothers. Mario and his man, Wayo, rented a stash house in Nuevo Laredo. To prepare the product to be smuggled across the border and up to Dallas, they designated one room for the first wrapping—“the dirty room.” After the first wrapping, they took off their clothes and passed the drugs to the second room, “the clean room,” then showered and put on new clothes before the final wrapping. On Mario’s first big coke deal he made $25,000 in profit, then set about expanding his new operation.
Mario purchased pickup trucks from which he removed panels and lights. The trick was packing the drugs in a part of the vehicle where the body wouldn’t lose its hollow sound when slapped. It got to where Mario was buying ten kilos per week. Then twenty. Then thirty-five. When the brothers saw that Mario was a reliable and steady client, they began to front, or advance, the youngster his kilos.
It wasn’t long until Mario discovered he could trade guns for drugs. The brothers would take all the guns Mario could smuggle south. The profit on a dozen AR-15s—purchased for a total of $18,000 at a gun show in Texas and sold to the brothers for $30,000 in Mexico—covered one kilo and the payment to the “straw purchasers” who bought the guns for Mario at the Texas gun shows. With every dozen assault rifles Mario smuggled south, the “brick” was therefore free and the entire $18,000 sale price in Dallas was profit. Mario began moving fifty kilos per week to Dallas. He used a Buick Riviera, a Lincoln Navigator, a Ford Expedition, a Dodge Ram. When Nuevo Laredo started becoming more violent, in 2004, he rented a new stash house across the river, a cute pink house on Topaz Trail, an upscale suburban street on Laredo’s expensive north side.
A diligent hustler was a hot commodity in the Company, and the Company’s social fabric absorbed Mario. They invited him to barbecues in Nuevo Laredo, where up-and-coming comandantes, always looking to expand their own networks, schmoozed Mario. Any ranking Company man knew that in order to rise, and remain a welcome member, he needed to generate income.
“Nah,” Miguel said when his Company colleagues tried to tempt Mario with better deals. “He’s my gente.”
Mario was getting in deep, and it wasn’t long before he started to learn about the downside of doing business with the Company. For one, if he wanted to move the “white” he’d have to move the less profitable “green” as well. Mario woke up in Dallas one day and found 1,200 pounds of marijuana on his doorstep unbidden. Lacking storage, he kept the eighty-pound bundles in his mom’s garage, unaware that his parole-violating cousin was staying there. It was a depressing day when, after the cops came to the house to retrieve his cousin on the parole violation and discovered the pot in the garage, Mario’s mom, who’d been arrested with the cousin for possessing 1,200 pounds of pot, called Mario from jail and Mario had to remind her to keep her mouth shut. A few times, Miguel sent kilos that were no good, and Mario had to pay anyway. Being gente, it turned out, meant taking the good with the bad. The bad could be pretty shitty.
But there was one outcome he dreaded the most. And it came in late 2004, when he had to call Miguel and say, “My calves drowned.” Ninety bricks of the white had been seized from his transporter on the way to New York. Mario, having been fronted nearly two hundred pounds of cocaine, owed the Company a million dollars. He went to Nuevo Laredo to try to make good with Miguel, to ask for another load to make up the loss. But Miguel wasn’t receptive. He kept Mario overnight. In the morning, a panicked Mario left without permission.
Now, in the fancy pink stash house on Topaz Trail—surrounded by the paraphernalia of a smuggling operation: Food Saver machines and plastic wrap for vacuum-packing drugs; hollowed-out TVs for transporting kilos; and a lifetime supply of tire shiner and Windex for concealing aromas—Mario and Wayo reached a decision. Mario would hand himself over to the brothers, and trade in his Hummer for credit. Wayo would stay in Laredo and wait for instructions.
“We have to handcuff you,” Miguel said when Mario returned to Nuevo Laredo. “You might try to run off on us again.”
They went hunting, and then Mario rode along on stash-house raids. Mario watched Miguel respond casually to chaos and gunfire. He rarely looked over his shoulder or surveyed a room before walking in. Miguel’s escolta, his squad of soldiers, protected him; but on missions, Miguel went first, always moving toward the engagement with the same strutting brutality: chin up, toes out.
They gave Mario kilos to send across to Wayo, who brought them to Dallas. Ten keys here, ten there. Mario got his cuenta down to $120,000. He cut that number in half by giving them $60,000 worth of jewelry.
After four weeks of detention, they were at a restaurant when Miguel announced, “I’m going to let Mario leave now.”
Mario was elated; paying his debt hadn’t guaranteed his freedom, or even his life. Some in the cartel world were loath to let any debtor live. Those who’d been threatened over money tended to hold grudges. Suppose Mario decided to become an informant for the government?
But this prospect, apparently, didn’t bother Miguel. For a drug kingpin in Chicago or New York, insulating yourself against the snitching of arrested subordinates was a constant concern. But Miguel had the greatest insulation ever: a two-thousand-mile border that divided the Company from American law enforcement, and ensconced it in a world of its own rulemaking. Besides, Mario was an American, and it was hard to justify killing a good American runner.
No, it made sense for Miguel to let Mario live. But someone else would eventually pay for this smuggler’s reprieve
13
Garcia’s Orgasm
For Robert Garcia, being a good cop was all about what he called the Mental Fuck. As a young patrolman, he learned the value of a good one. When he got called to testify, he always showed up early to court to banter with the defense attorney. He’d bullshit about a past case, or recall that time they had dinner, if they knew one another. Then, later, after being cross-examined, he’d swing by the defendant’s table again, during the break, and joke some more. “Geez,” he’d say, “you almost had me on that one!” And the whole time he could see the crook thinking, Isn’t this lawyer supposed to be working for me? There it was, the Mental Fuck.
Defense lawyers taught Robert a lot. The best ones were nice in the early going of a cross-examination. They pretended to believe everything he said. Robert called it doing “a Columbo” on someone—giving a false sense of security to set him up for later.
The Mental Fuck, at its core, came back to control. He’d spend days or weeks preparing to testify, memorizing hundreds of facts and dates from a case that might share facts with other cases. When testimony day came, he wanted to burst through the doors, rush to the stand, and pour it all out. He always reminded himself to go slow.
The prosecutor called hi
s name. The doors swung open. Everyone looked back. He strolled in, buttoned his jacket, unbuttoned it when he reached the stand. Adjusted the chair. Adjusted the microphone. Asked for water. Answered questions slowly. Saw where the defense attorney was going. Responded slower than the attorney wanted.
Trial was a big show. But it could be a beautiful dance when properly controlled.
Robert learned control in the squad car, during the early years, when federal agents he’d soon work with were still off at college. Every day he stopped people, mixed it up with criminals, learned how to talk to them, how to be easy, how to pretend, convincingly, that they were the ones doing the Mental Fuck on him. Later, he saw the college guys come, the ones who went straight to DEA or FBI without law enforcement experience. They’d be all uptight in the streets, using fancy words to sound authoritative, as if talking in a cop show. The criminals, like dogs, smelled that fear.
In the police station, in the interrogation room with informants and suspects, control came down to reading a personality. The gangster wanted his ego stroked. The reformed addict wanted to be a cop. The beat-up weekend girl just wanted to be heard. If he didn’t find their motivation, he had nothing to play to, and then he’d be the one getting played.
Ten percent of the time, murder suspects broke down and cried at the station. Robert comforted them. They told him everything. The other 90 percent of suspects came into the interrogation room with a plan, a set of lies to tell. If Robert expected them not to lie, and jumped all over every line of bullshit, he got nowhere fast. The criminal knew how far he could push. Robert learned to let himself be pushed even further. He wanted them to lie, to get that shit out of their system. Because in between the lies there were going to be bits of truth. The key was gathering those nuggets and putting them in storage for confirmation and cross-checking. The hours-long back-and-forth, give-and-take of a great interrogation, well, for Robert this exchange was a kind of intellectual sex, Mental Fuck culminating in Mental Orgasm. He came out of the interrogation room thinking, Ah, give me a cigarette!